Atiyyah Khan is a writer, researcher and arts journalist based in Cape Town. She has been writing about music and culture in South Africa since 2008. She is also the co-founder of music collective Future Nostalgia, which hosts regular vinyl listening sessions around Cape Town.

By Mogorosi Motshumi Self-Published/ Xlibris, 2016

At the Cape Town launch of The Initiation, a book heralded as “the first graphic autobiography by a Black South African,” Mogorosi Motshumi, in keeping with his character, gracefully sidestepped having to dwell in the limelight for too long. “Thank you and thank you,” he said to the packed audience before taking his seat.

But it is because Motshumi speaks sufficiently through his art and has done so throughout the last 30 years working as a political artist, beginning with The Friend newspaper in the 1970s. What better way to convey his life story than though the medium he communicates best in and has dedicated his life to. The Initiation is the first instalment of a three-part autobiography which has been ten years in the making – Book Two: Jozi Jungle and Book Three: Back to the Blues are still on the way – but when asked about it, he replied, humbly: “I’m a little bit worried that the lines are too thin, but that’s my fault anyways.”

The significance of the work is doubly important as, at the time of publishing, Motshumi had lost sight in one eye and the other is slowly deteriorating. Like many often overlooked and underrated South African artists, he has not reaped the benefits of a country still in transition. The work put into the book was done with minimal materials, living alone in Bloemfontein, in the home where his story begins.

In the opening pages, we are transported to Batho, a small township in Bloemfontein, and into the house of Oumama, Motshumi’s grandmother. The innocence and naivety of childhood is captured beautifully with lightness and humour, using simple, cartoonlike drawings for the early years of his life. Here we meet Motshumi’s family and discover his deep love for drawing and his respect for his grandmother. Her teachings are carried throughout. In one scene, he is found crouching on the ground in his backyard, drawing in the sand as he fondly recalls his brother teaching him how to draw. Boyhood is a long, sweet kind of nostalgia and through it we discover Gori, Golo, Gurah, Godda and many more of the nicknames he is called.

The story shifts between Bloemfontein and Zeerust, and the difficulty of moving around as a child. There is very little emotion revealed and we get only hints of the commonplace acts of racism experienced in daily life during apartheid.

This quietness that Motshumi possesses today comes after many years of rebellion. Finding his voice and identity begins at school, where among peers there is already motivation to stand up against figures of authority. One instance is pointed out, where he gets beaten by a teacher out of racial hatred rather than discipline. He states: “I grew up with a healthy disrespect for authority.” This loathing continues throughout his schooling career in various instances as he joins the student movement and uprising against an all-Afrikaans curriculum.

For a solid chunk of the book, the pace is slow, each day unfolding a life lesson. Haphazardly, lines get bolder as Motshumi grows older; shades get darker and time speeds up. A turn of a page could mean the jump of a few years and this lends to the later quickness of the read. A look into Motshumi’s earlier work, such as in Sloppy done in the 1980s, shows bolder stand-alone comic strips, whereas The Initiation reads rather like a stream-of-consciousness exploration.

The Initiation also details Motshumi’s political awakening and his involvement with the Black Consciousness Movement. Motshumi’s work as an activist and political commentator is also highlighted, showing the artist following the voice of his own mind, fiercely guarding his autonomy, even if it means falling out of favour with publications. One of the most chilling moments happens when he is arrested and detained by the security police. Motshumi illustrates his inner demons during solitary confinement in the form of amorphic figures, with only a spider on the ground as a companion.

The first part of the trilogy concludes with Motshumi being forced to move to Johannesburg and leaving his wife and newborn son behind. What is redeeming, though, is that the title graphic illustration of the book, showing three generations from boyhood to adulthood, was done by the same son, artist Atang Tshikare, with whom Motshumi reconnected years later over a joint love for music and art.

The Initiation is a transportation to a reality within realities, and manages to resonate even in another time, showing the brave nature of an individual’s struggles. Motshumi’s ability to recall these deeply personal early events of his life and transfer that via images is astounding. While he continues to keep a low profile, the most important result is that we now have an invaluable documentation of this work, with the story continuing in two more installations on the way.

This review appears in Chronic Books Foods, a supplement to the Chronic (April 2017). An edition which aims to complicate the questions raised by food insecurity, to cook and serve them differently.

Food is largely presented as scarcity, lack, loss – Africa’s always desperate exceptionalism or exceptional desperation or whatever. In this issue, we put food back on the table: to restore the interdependence between the mouth that eats and the mouth that speaks, and to delve deeper into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make food both a subversive art and a site of pleasure.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop,or get copies from your nearest dealer.

Stacy Hardy is a writer and senior editor at Chimurenga. She is also founding member of Black Ghost Books. Her collection of short fiction, Because the Night, was published by Pocko in 2015.

By Ibrahim al-Koni*. Interlink Pub Group, 2002

I met the news that Ibrahim al-Koni was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker International Prize with mixed emotions. Elated that this acclaimed, prolific author was finally being acknowledged outside the Arab world, but wary of the media hype that usually follows such accolades. But al-Koni didn’t win and his shortlisting did little to raise his profile in the West. The scattering of write-ups that appeared in the Anglophone press largely aligned him to the magical realist tradition (“readers of Garcia Marquez and Allende will want to know about al-Koni”), or described his work as fanatical eco-fiction. These labels do little to capture the literary, political and religious depth of his work.

Maybe it’s the complexity of al-Koni’s life and political affiliations that kept, and continue to keep, the media at bay, despite the growing number of translations of his work into English. Born in 1948 in the Nalut District of the Tripolitania region in north-western Libya, al-Koni learned Arabic as a second language – his mother tongue is Tamasheq, the language of the Tuareg. As a young man, he was infused with the utopian revolutionary aspirations that chequered Libya’s recent history after the advent of the 1969 al-Fatah revolution and joined Qaddhafi’s government. Aligning himself with Socialist International, the Non-Aligned Movement, the Arab League and the Organisation of African Unity, in the mid-1970s he travelled to Moscow where he learnt Russian, worked as a journalist, and studied philosophy and comparative literature at the Maxim Gorky Institute, graduating with an MA thesis on Dostoyevsky. After the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, and the subsequent flourishing of criminal capitalism, he moved to Switzerland.

Over the course of his nomadic life, al-Koni has written more than 80 works, including novels, stories and aphorisms, all suffused with a combination of Sufi mysticism, socialism, Tuareg mythology and existentialism. While he refuses the idea of influences (“being influenced does not make writers of us. It is the spirit of having a mission that makes us do what we do, whether we want to or not.”), he cites Ecclesiastes, the Epistles of Saint Paul, the Upanishads, Laozi, the Egyptian priest Anhi, the Sumerian Gilgamesh, Cervantes, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Faulkner, Schopenhauer, Kafka, Knut Hamsun, Laxness, Camus, Asturias, Kawabata, Llosa, and more as “the lighthouses by which we can illuminate a trip that will certainly be nocturnal”.

The geography of his books is equally nomadic and nocturnal, refusing starkly lit division. As his English translator, Elliott Colla, points out in al-Koni’s map, the Sahara is not a boundary or “an isolated backwater”, but rather “a crucial articulating link, distinct but adjoining the Arabo-Berber Maghreb with the African Sahel”. Colla explains: “In placing the Tuareg at the center of his universe – a universe he composes solely in Arabic – he rewrites the places of Arabs and others on the maps.”

In al-Koni’s books, the Arab and Tuareg worlds are not separate, but entangled. What’s more, land is at the centre of the liberation struggle, not as a possession, something to be reclaimed or owned, or saved, but rather as an active force in the perpetual struggle against Western hegemony and imperialism. His novel, The Bleeding of the Stone, is a case in point. It is set in the desert, but here the desert is not really a place. It’s a transcendental, shadow of a place, a time-space maybe, but time-space in the desert is a mythical, nocturnal time, where past, present and future merge into an eternal moment. The desert holds everything, but in disguise, “it is a place with absolute freedom, a lost dimension between life and death”.

In The Bleeding of the Stone the space between nature and history is closed, the voices and the deaths in the desert are made a part of that desert. Moving fluidly through time and with multiple narrative shifts, the story follows Asouf, a solitary Bedouin and the sole keeper of the desert’s secret: where the legendary mouflon, a wild sheep whose meat is highly valued, hides. When two foreign hunters (who have already decimated the once-thriving gazelle population) order Asouf to show them the mouflon, he resists.

But Asouf does not challenge the colonisers alone. He has the desert as his teacher, and as the plot unfolds, it schools him in its trickster tactics and its magic – rippling of the mirages, shifting sands, sudden oasis. In the end, the colonists brutally kill Asouf, beating his head against the edge of a desert rock, but as they leap into the truck and switch on the engine, “great drops of rain” begin to “beat on its windows, washing away, too, the blood of the man crucified on the face of the rock”, washing it back into the sand, the soil, the earth from which it came, into the desert that now waits to swallow and avenge the colonising murders. As al-Koni writes in A Sleepless Eye, his 2014 collection of aphorisms: “In the desert we die in body but live in spirit.”

Al-Koni too has learned from this desert. His books might well be mythical and fantastical, operating in a realm between life and death, but to al-Koni myth is political; it has the capacity to embrace the public, the visionary, dreams, the revolutionary. Sailing past physical and national borders and comfort zones, transgressing the boundaries between man and nature, and protesting with ferocious invention the extinguishment of a people and the colonial brutalisation of the land, his writing performs an assault on the idea that words keep things separate. He writes from the point of impact; from the collision between languages, between forms and ideas, between cultures and religions. Yet despite their jarring encounters, the writing is agile and inventive, from moment to moment gripping, exhilarating; other times it drifts and swells like sand dunes in a desert, cresting and accumulating into a landscape that shifts like wind and words. Al-Koni translates the land, its people, the practice of translation itself, and the pulse of desire for freedom. What emerges is a politically theorised re-encounter.

With his linguistic and visionary commitment, his capacity to imagine what is perforce outside experience and outside language, his ability to conjure entangled time-spaces, and his unyielding commitment to freedom, al-Koni opens new possibilities for writing. His books belong among the great works of African liberation.

*Translated by May Jayyusi and Christopher Tingley.

This review appears in Chronic Books Foods, a supplement to the Chronic (April 2017). An edition which aims to complicate the questions raised by food insecurity, to cook and serve them differently.

Food is largely presented as scarcity, lack, loss – Africa’s always desperate exceptionalism or exceptional desperation or whatever. In this issue, we put food back on the table: to restore the interdependence between the mouth that eats and the mouth that speaks, and to delve deeper into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make food both a subversive art and a site of pleasure.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop,or get copies from your nearest dealer.

Stacy Hardy is a writer and senior editor at Chimurenga. She is also founding member of Black Ghost Books. Her collection of short fiction, Because the Night, was published by Pocko in 2015.

By Calixthe Beyala. Psychology News Press Ltd, 2015

In an era where we should all be feminists, as Adichie tells us, or bad feminists, according to Roxane Gay, and where Yemisi Aribisala has revealed the alchemy of how food becomes a love potion (“fish soup are the mediums and aphrodisiacs, the juju and fetishes of our sexual bewitchment”), Calixthe Beyala’s How To Cook Your Husband The African Way, first published in France at the beginning of the millennium, and recently reissued in translation, might seem slightly old fashioned. Herein lies its charm. The story reads like Emmanuelle meets Onitsha Market Literature mixed with the family cookbook, so, part sex romp, part morality tale. From porcupine with the nuts of wild mangoes to a boa in banana leaves, the devoted narrator, Aissatou, is hell-bent on cooking her way to the heart of her love object, one Mr Bolobolo, a Malian immigrant to Paris. She starts cooking him meals. At first, he hesitates, but soon finds himself unable to resist and digs in: “The porcupine is delicious. We forget civilisation so-called and dive into African savageries. We eat with our fingers like in the tropics. Sauce trickles down our fingers.”

The cliché that the way to a man’s heart is his stomach however soon proves as flimsy as the myth that “a beautiful woman is flat as a pancake, thin as a rake or a slice of Melba toast”. As Aissatou realises, Melba toast snaps easily: “What can a man eat of you? Bones, fish bones. Your bones are so scrawny a white guy’s dog wouldn’t gnaw them”. Fish becomes something fishy – “You mean to say your guy likes fish and you make him all kinds of fish and he still goes to restaurants to eat fish.” And cooking is neither magic nor science, “it is the stuff of life, the same as life”.

Forget Beyala’s over-zealous attempt to overturn already well-worn myths and cliché regarding gender, race and sexuality, and sink into the food, the sex, the sweet humour and delicious language that freight each line of this playful Parisian rom-com with a surfeit of taste, smell and texture. There may well be, as the author tells us, “problems in life that even a porcupine cooked with wild mango nuts will not resolve”, but why bother with them when Beyala has given us a catalogue of all 24 recipes Aissatou uses to “cook” Mr Bolobolo into a husband, to get our fingers and our tongues dirty on?

This review appears in Chronic Books Foods, a supplement to the Chronic (April 2017). An edition which aims to complicate the questions raised by food insecurity, to cook and serve them differently.

Food is largely presented as scarcity, lack, loss – Africa’s always desperate exceptionalism or exceptional desperation or whatever. In this issue, we put food back on the table: to restore the interdependence between the mouth that eats and the mouth that speaks, and to delve deeper into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make food both a subversive art and a site of pleasure.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop,or get copies from your nearest dealer.

Emeka Ugwu is a Data Analyst who lives in Lagos, Nigeria. He also reviews books at Wawa Book Review.

Edited by Otosirieze Obi-Young. Brittle Paper, 2016.

Dear Reader,

To Whom It May Concern.

My name is Emeka Ugwu, I am a Wawa man. I write this letter to inform you about the state of affairs in the country where I was born, from a hamlet in Akegbe-Ugwu, the place my ancestors call home. As I write, Microsoft Word does not recognise either my name or that of my village. Regardless, from my name though, you may already figure I am an Igbo made in Nigeria (not from the American first nation), so I only need add that my country tells me my state of origin is Enugu. My green passport clearly indicates I was born in Port Harcourt, a city where I also feel at home.

I live in Lagos, that beautiful city by the lagoon, a place I also love to call my home. At the time of my birth in the year of my country’s first economic recession, 1981, Enugu, this city of coal buried afoot the Udi plateau, did not exist as a state. It was carved out 25 years ago by one General Ibrahim Babangida. If you asked me in the late 1980s, as my countrymen are wont to for mostly flimsy reasons, I would claim Anambra as my state of origin. So you see, in a way Onitsha is also a place where I am at home whenever I chance a visit.

On 1 October 2016, my country celebrated its 56th year of independence. Eighteen days after, I added another year myself. Both these events in a month when Africa celebrates two of her finest and most illustrious sons, Thomas Sankara and Fela Kuti, yield space for one to think about the deeper meaning of home and what it means to leave home in order to discover home. This question is at the centre of Enter Naija: The Book of Places, a new anthology edited by Otosirieze Obi-Young, and released online as an e-book with Brittle Paper.

Enter Naija: The Book of Places is an invitation to engage Nigeria as an idea, which might not yet have materialised, but has at least begun to crystallise as more and more subjects begin to understand their power as citizens. It is a collection of short stories, poems, visual art images, photographs and essays about places that crisscross this specific home, Nigeria, a nation-space that this book’s contributors all feel strongly about. It is a gift. A gesture made from a place of love. The book is free but priceless. It is a gambit not a gambol.

Considering the liberal cosmopolitan worldview that inspires this visionary work, one is inclined to pitch tents with Obi-Young who thinks “of places as people, with layers of distinctness never to be known until known, always retaining their capacity to startle,” if only to invoke an indaba that aims for “eclectic interpretations, full, rounded contemplations of physical features and population characteristics of places” like Kano, Auchi, Ikot Ekpene and Akure.

The young compatriots, who have taken up Obi-Young’s challenge and entered this Naija do not typify your ordinary Nigerian, for whom complaints usually signal strategy not noise. Individually, each stands out as an outlier whose outlook will mark the future. Collectively, they present a strategy to write about home by writing back home, from home. The bulk of them are university students or university graduates, some of whom are engaged in national youth service. Together they posit, as Tanure Ojaide does in his poem, that “It No Longer Matters Where You Live.”

The point is driven home in the story, “Scares on the Other Side of Beauty, or: The Neglected Facts of Ukanafun People” by Iduehe Udom. Here the graduate of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka writes:

“Discussing the culture and traditions of the Ukanafun people, he mentioned Ekpo, Ekong. Ekpe, Utu-ekpe, Akoko, Ekon, Ewa-Ikang Udukghe, Usoro Afa Edia, Usoro Afa Isua, Usoro Ndo and Enin as the most interesting events. He mentioned that trading, fishing, hunting, farming, sculpturing and palm produce hold significant contributions to the slowed-down economy of the town since the civil war depopulated the area and kept it in a situation that many governments have made no efforts to help her recover from.”

If you ignore syntax, or the fact that I know little about these events myself, though I vaguely recall seeing the Ekpe masquerade-costume on a visit to the British Museum once, you will see how the neglected facts evoked in the story’s title help shape discourse about home.

The Ukanafun local government area was created in 1977 from Abak and Opobo divisions of the then Cross-River state. Today Ukanafun is a local government area in Akwa-Ibom, another state that was carved out alongside Enugu in 1991 and, as we learn in Udom’s story, it is a place that is yet to recover from the civil war of 1967–70. It is a place the Annang people call home.

Today under the banner of Independent People of Biafra (IPOB), there is a renewed call for secession by my Igbo people. Where do the Annang stand in relation to this? To understand this slippery slope, we will have to ask how the Annang man remembers Biafra. But first we must comprehend that Naija is home to 250 ethnic groups with 350 languages spread across 37 states.

These days most readers enter Nigeria through the work of my sister, Chimamanda Adichie. In May of 2014, Adichie’s piece, “Hiding From Our Past” and published in The New Yorker, took a dig at the “Nigerian government censors” who were delaying the release of the film adaptation of Half of a Yellow Sun. “The war was the seminal event in Nigeria’s modern history, but I learnt little about it in school,” Adichie wrote, “‘Biafra’ was wrapped in mystery.” She goes on to explain:

“I became haunted by history. I spent years researching and writing Half of a Yellow Sun, a novel about human relationships during the war, centred on a young, privileged woman and her professor lover. It was a deeply personal project based on interviews with family members who were generous enough to mine their pain, yet I knew that it would, for many Nigerians of my generation, be as much history as literature.”

Adichie criticises the film’s censorship as “absurd”: “[S]ecurity operatives, uninformed and alert, gathered in a room watching a romantic film – the censor’s action is more disappointing than surprising, because it is a part of a larger Nigerian political culture that is steeped in denial, in looking away.” For my part, I find it rather curious that, in speaking out against censorship, she censors quite a significant bit of the Biafran impasse. Hiding behind her own past she looks away from the Igbo domination of Annang people.

Her working premise assumes ostensibly that since the “massacres in northern Nigeria” which targeted only “south-eastern Igbo people” inevitably led to a secession, the Efik, Ijaw, Ibibio and Itsekiri man relinquished his own identity, so it is okay to lump them together as Igbo people who share a common grievance. Ken Saro-Wiwa must be choking on a pipe in his grave. Remind me, what exactly the Ogoni man was on about in his book, On a Darkling Plain? My own sense is that truth sadly was the first casualty of the Nigerian civil war.

Enter Naija: The Book of Places invites readers to enter this impasse by taking a new approach. One that looks ahead instead of dwelling on the past. One that is inclusive instead of selective. In a time of Boko Haram, of increased hostilities in creeks of the Niger Delta, and of the scourge of cattle herdsmen, the question that reverberates most strongly for me is: how does Nigeria retreat in order to advance. Inertia?

Adichie suggests remembering by memorialising. She suggests building a memorial, and I concur but insist, one for all those who lost their lives during the civil war. Touched by the pain of the Annang people, who inhabit the landspace Udom illumines, I am drawn to more didactic approaches because, as physicist Cesar Hildago asserts in Why Information Grows: for complex systems like Nigeria the message is not its meaning. Yet the difference betwixt societies depends on how they order information. Nigeria is as weak as the weakest link in its network of people(s).

To bring my concern closer home, it is only fair considering I have appropriated Obi Egbuna’s Diary of a Homeless Prodigal as title of my own letter for an entirely selfish purpose. This allows me to place my writing into a network of other writing. It also allows me to edge this reflection towards his thoughts as expressed in one letter, “Meeting My People”. Egbuna questions hard: “How can I explain Che’s meaning that ten city intellectuals are worth less than one farmer in the village, that the African problem can never be solved by the African ‘Elite’ because the African ‘Elite’ is part of the problem?” The answer is not simple but there is an answer: organise and build.

Enter Naija: The Book of Places offers an entry point, one way of organising and building. It situates multiple places within a deeply fractured nation space wherein Egbuna’s searching question seeks an answer. It answers by sending messages about the human condition and lived experience so that we, the reader, can mine them for meaning fleshed out of information about the plight of people(s). It allows us to join the conversation by assembling our own answers. It shows how irrespective of ethnicity/religion, elite interests lie only in the appropriation of wealth and labour for the consolidation of state power. It shows that the solution to our problems resides in our ability to build expansive and inclusive social networks that allow us to leave home in order to discover home.

Thank you for your attention and time. I urge you, enter Naija, come see where we are going.

Prodigally Yours.

This piece appears in the Chronic (April 2017). An edition which aims to complicate the questions raised by food insecurity, to cook and serve them differently.

Food is largely presented as scarcity, lack, loss – Africa’s always desperate exceptionalism or exceptional desperation or whatever. In this issue, we put food back on the table: to restore the interdependence between the mouth that eats and the mouth that speaks, and to delve deeper into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make food both a subversive art and a site of pleasure.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop,or get copies from your nearest dealer.

]]>http://chimurengachronic.co.za/a-letter-from-a-homeless-prodigal/feed/08798Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: A history of creative writing instruction in East Africahttp://chimurengachronic.co.za/penpoints-gunpoints-and-dreams/
http://chimurengachronic.co.za/penpoints-gunpoints-and-dreams/#respondTue, 18 Apr 2017 09:27:46 +0000http://chimurengachronic.co.za/?p=8431

From the earnest hustle of our elders in writing during the 1960s to the contemporary dreams of ubiquitous hustler writers, Billy Kahora* wonders about the place of creative writing programmes.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s memoir, Birth of a Dream Weaver, describes a unique moment at the 1962 Makerere Conference for Literature that feels straight out of a creative writing workshop. His short story, “The Return”, published by Transition, is being discussed in the short story session at the conference. South African writer Bloke Modisane says: “It [The Return] lacks emotional motivation; the dialogue is used not to heighten the drama but to explain the events.”

Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and La Guma’s A Walk in the Night come under the workshop treatment in the novel session. History’s broad brushstrokes paint the conference as a political conference attended by writers. And of course as spectacle – the place that gave birth to African writing in English. But as Ngugi points out in Birth of a Dream Weaver: “But for me, a writer in his very beginnings, the most important discussions were not about philosophy and ideology but rather the specifics of texts, elements of the craft of writing.”

The same discussions were taking place in classrooms at the English Department at Makerere University. In an essay, “Makerere: The Place of the Early Sunrise”, Margaret Macpherson writes: “If students were taking minor English they were encouraged to write.” The English Department initiated a literary competition that attracted the likes of Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Peter Nazareth. There was also the Makerere Writers Club that met fortnightly at lecturers’ houses or the university canteen to talk books and writings. But of course there was all the other stuff. Ngugi highlights Lewis Nkosi’s write-up of the conference as the best possible conclusive summary of the insider’s take of Makerere 1962: “Mostly young, impatient, sardonic, talking endlessly about the problems of creation, and looking, while doing so, as though they were amazed that fate had entrusted them with the task of interpreting a continent to the world.”

Artist impression of group photo of participants at the First Conference of African Writer of English Expression, Makerere University, 1962 (Illustration: Dada Khanyisa)

Ngugi’s own writing journey has always prominently featured political questions rather than matters of craft, at least in public reactions. But in his memoirs and other communications, a tenuous strand can be put together. In Birth of a Dream Weaver:

“My Limuru and Kenya remain a land from which I have escaped, but I want to write about it; I want to make sense of it… I scribble a few words here and there, but nothing forms. I am upset, I have lived in a landscape of fear but I am unable to write about it… And then one night I hear a melody, then the words… so the memories come back. Then it hits me – the dedication, the collective will. That’s what I want to write about. The collective dreams for a meaningful tomorrow. The barefoot teacher was at the center of the dream. He is the interpreter of the world: he brings the world to the people; he is the prophet of a tomorrow. I want to write about this so bad, it’s like a fever that has seized me again and intensified.”

A motif that triggers the writing of his second novel, Weep Not Child, is a song. This recurs in his memories of childhood, his teenage high school years and at Makerere University. He becomes attached to the songs told in the oral stories of his childhood, the songs he remembers at Alliance High School and now the songs of collective struggle at the university. “Best for me were those stories in which the audience would join in the singing of the chorus… this intensified my anticipation of what would happen next.” He discovers through the Old Testament in Gikuyu that “written words can also sing”. His writing journey learning craft continues in his second memoir, In the House of the Interpreter:

“The King James–authorized version remained one of my favorite reads. I learned to mix the simple, the compound, and the complex for different effects. Give me some more pages, I wrote back to Kenneth. But don’t use big words. Read the Bible again and see how English is used.”

Before Ngugi left Makerere, he was already writing for the now defunct Nairobi-based Sunday Post and later he would almost join the newsroom – that other early breeding ground for this generation of African writers – but was deterred by a magnanimous British editor who advised that his craft would suffer. Nonetheless, Ngugi credits his time as an op-ed writer for the Nation for some of his literary chops by learning to write to deadline. The newsroom as a kind of craft workshop.

This trajectory continued, with Ngugi shaping his craft fluidly between the university and informal spaces. In 1967, he accepted a position at the University of Nairobi, becoming the teacher he alludes to in Birth of a Dream Weaver – not barefoot, but certainly at the centre of a dream. By 1971, he was the “first African to head a department at a university” at the University of Nairobi’s Department of Literature. It was a path that would come to define Anglophone writing in East Africa and elsewhere on the continent, as it emerged via the flow of words and knowledge between international MFA programmes and local university literature departments, the networks developed by local writers, editors and institutions, and the bold moves made by some writers based in universities to break down the division between theory and praxis in the university classroom.

A single typewriter was the University College, Ibadan’s (UCI) first official contribution to creative writing – a meagre donation to the student literary publication Horn, founded by a British lecturer who joined UCI’s English Department from the University of Leeds in 1956. At the time, the UCI curriculum essentially mimicked that taught in London and Horn was within this ambit. Modelled on the University of Leeds’ Poetry & Audience, it relegated literary creation to an extramural activity – one that had a home in the English Department, but no place in the official curriculum. This confined its impact but it also gave it the freedom to move beyond the colonial syllabus.

The magazine, edited by a young and talented Nigerian undergraduate named JP Clark, soon became home to UCI graduates Christopher Okigbo and Wole Soyinka. After graduating, Okigbo became an active member of the writing community in Nigeria and regularly worked between the university and public spaces. As assistant librarian at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, he founded the African Authors Association. Along with Soyinka and Achebe, Okigbo belonged to the Mbari Writers and Artists Club in Ibadan, co-founded by Ulli Beier as a place for new writers, dramatists and artists to meet and read their work.

Beier was a maverick. An itinerant German-Jewish editor, writer and scholar, he had travelled from London to Ibadan in 1950 to teach at UCI. Faced with what he dubbed the colonial chauvinism of the university, he soon moved to the Extramural Studies Department outside of Ibadan. While a teacher at UCI, he travelled often and attended the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris organized by Présence Africaine at the Sorbonne. Inspired by what he heard, he founded Black Orpheus on his return.

The Ministry of Education in Nigeria might have sponsored the first six issues of the magazine, but the journal defiantly declared itself not just outside the academy, but openly against it. The editorial to its inaugural issue (September 1957) reads: “the primary purpose of this journal is to encourage and discuss contemporary African writing” and that, unlike UCI’s curriculum, it would include oral literature, Afro-American writing, and translations from non-anglophone African literature.

South African writer Ezekiel Es’kia Mphahlele, in exile in Nigeria, regularly published in Black Orpheus, alongside soon-to-be prominent writers like Soyinka, Gabriel Okara, Alex La Guma, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Grace Ogot. Mphahlele was also an active participant in lively debates at Mbari that would shape the immediate future of writing and how it was taught on the continent. Mphahlele went on to set up a Mbari centre in Enugu, Nigeria, under the directorship of John Enekwe.

In 1962, he joined JP Clark, Robert Serumaga, Bloke Modisane, Lewis Nkosi, Ngugi and more at the Makerere conference. The following year, shortly before Kenyan independence, Mphahlele arrived in Nairobi to establish a new Mbari centre. One of the aims of the centre was to throw open the debate of the place of African literature in the university curriculum and to drum up support for the inclusion of African literature as a substantive area of study at university, where traditionally it was being pushed into extramural departments and institutes of African Studies.

In 1971, a colloquium on Black aesthetics held at Nairobi extended this agenda. The colloquium resulted in the publication of two volumes by the East African Literature Bureau: Black Aesthetics (1973) edited by Pio Zirimu and Andrew Gun, and Writers in East Africa (1974) edited by Andrew Gun and Angus Calder. Here, the main preoccupations of the participants was not the usual literary criticism and analysis, but the creative act of writing, the establishment of a distinct East African voice, the nature of the writer’s audience and the choice of language.

Ugandan poet Okot p’Bitek used the opportunity to attack any suggestion that there was a need for critical analysis, stating that “the creative and most enjoyable human activity has been reduced by interested professors into a game played by professionals according to professional rules, for which they are paid the highest salaries in East Africa.”

A few years earlier, p’Bitek had joined Ngugi at the University of Nairobi, after being dismissed as the director of the Uganda Cultural Centre for having criticised the government. Taban Lo Liyong, the first African to graduate from the Iowa Writers Workshop, followed in 1968. Together they managed to change the name of the Department of English Literature to the Department of Literature. A key part of this transformation was challenging the division between theory and praxis. Writing workshops were integrated into the curriculum and the examination allowed for one paper to be replaced by a piece of creative writing.

This was a dramatic shift, but Taban continued to advocate for a full MFA programme within the university: “We could say the Revolution of Literary Studies has had some success,” he wrote in 1969, continuing:

“It has introduced new topics, and new subjects, but it has not, unfortunately, produced the scholarship and scholars to sufficiently justify it… But, without having taken courses in creative writing, or enrolled in creative writing courses by correspondence, how could they hope to rise above the also-wrote! The system inherited from Britain could not have been expected to produce any better products in Africa. Only an American system of undergraduate and post-graduate programme, the type that produced me, could have done the revolution justice.”

Since this was absent at the university, Taban Lo Liyong joined a nascent group of intellectuals comprised of students and lecturers from the then Department of English and journalists who met fortnightly at the famous Paa ya Paa arts gallery founded by Tanzanian immigrant Elimo Njao.

Throughout the 1970s, Taban continued to informally teach creative writing for the pages of his numerous non-fiction books such as The Last Word (1969), Meditations in Limbo (1970) and Ballads of Underdevelopment (1976), which included provocations, notes and tips to writers wanting to shake up language and find new ways to write outside Western conventions.

The flood of creativity came to an end in December 1977, when officials in the government convinced President Jomo Kenyatta “that Petals of Blood and Ngaahika Ndeenda were ‘subversive’ and that Ngugi should be detained”. The detention of Ngugi signaled a turning point for the thriving cultural scene of Nairobi. It was followed by a mass exodus of scholars, writers, and journalists, echoing the bloody approach against writers in Uganda at the beginning of the 1970s.

Today, creative writing has yet to find its way in most anglophone public universities on the continent; South Africa is the exception with fledgling programmes at the Universities of Cape Town, Witwatersrand, KwaZulu-Natal, Currently Known as Rhodes, Western Cape, and Pretoria, and now even the new Sol Plaatje University (but even so, many of these mirror that of overseas counterparts in approach and methodology).

The continent still has its share of young, impatient and sardonic writers, but universities continue to treat creative writing largely as a hobby. Writing is left for extra-curricular spaces on campuses.

Most of the conversations about creation are happening in formal and informal creative writing workshops run by writers’ organisations on the continent and primarily in universities in the US, UK and South Africa.

Anecdotally, a quick run-through of the most prominent “informal” programmes on the continent show that characterisation, point of view, setting and description are staples borrowed from some programme in the West.

MFA vs The Hustle

Lately, most of the young writers I meet as editor of Kwani sound like aspirational entrepreneurs. They like to talk about opportunities, about platforms, are dismissive of politics, and eschew talk about the craft of writing itself. They write emails to set up meetings to talk about work they will never show you. So, when there is now work and I’m asked for opportunities, I suggest structured programmes because there is so much writing competition on the continent today. A young writer needs an edge. When I started writing seriously, the handful that were trying to do it full-time were all friends or acquaintances and had been published in Kwani. Over the years, the number of “writers” has grown exponentially. Every year I am asked to write a recommendation for another writer looking to enrol in an MFA in the UK or the US.

Recently, one brilliant young Kenyan writer I know came up to me saying he was worried that all his writer friends in Nairobi, his community, were applying for MFAs. He’d been working on his novel for the last two years and the usual signs that he was going a bit crazy were there. When I saw him now and then, he either seemed brilliantly effusive or Mathare-case withdrawn. And most times he’d been drinking. I suggested that maybe he needed to follow his community to an MFA programme. He looked existentially weary. He’d been doing Nairobi grit and I mentioned to him that he might want to take a few years off himself to attend a programme. He lit up and retorted that he did not want his writing to be Americanised. A brilliant understated writer, he was given to oral hyperbole. A week later, he asked to talk to me, his mien suggesting that there had been a death in the family. Then, he mentioned that he was in real doubts about his work and how it lacked real importance in the world.

I explained what an MFA could do that would solve all his immediate problems. He was good enough for someone to give him tuition, accommodation and then some more. His money struggles would ease up. I mentioned that MFAs also provide literary drinking opportunities and drunken sexual encounters. I did not tell him that he clearly needed a break from more practical mediocre types in his set who were making him think he was a genius. A lot of the most brilliant young writers on the continent are so comfortable in their own spaces that they are scared of going into the real test of a bigger scene that doesn’t give a fuck. I felt that in the right MFA programme he would meet other writers who came from similarly small ponds that would provide the right kind of competition. A small space can come with false reinforcement, negative enabling. The MFA programme does not lack all this, but it’s kind of different when you are far away from home. Eventually you will hide away even because of the cold, wet, dark evenings and write.

I ran into the writer recently and asked him whether he had applied to MFA programmes this last fall and he went quiet. Then, he shook his head. And said: “Oh man, I have been caught up in the hustle.” I bought him a drink and he asked: “Can you introduce me to the guys at Chimu. I want to write for them.”

“You know what you want to write?”

He laughed.

I laughed.

“Why are you laughing?”

“Just send Chimu a piece. You know their stuff.”

Now he laughed even louder. “Also, I want to talk to you about this new writer’s website I am starting with…,” he mentioned a few other writers.

That’s hustle.

*Additional research by Stacy Hardy

This piece appears in the Chronic (April 2017). An edition which aims to complicate the questions raised by food insecurity, to cook and serve them differently.

Food is largely presented as scarcity, lack, loss – Africa’s always desperate exceptionalism or exceptional desperation or whatever. In this issue, we put food back on the table: to restore the interdependence between the mouth that eats and the mouth that speaks, and to delve deeper into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make food both a subversive art and a site of pleasure.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop,or get copies from your nearest dealer.

When the goddess of happy accidents stumbles on a plot improbably hatched behind her back, she dreams of the perfect return to a state of grace. She nudges Yemisi Aribisala, a writer who loves, makes and writes about food with equal passion, to go live, at a decisive turn in the relentless search for a style to match those ardours in prose, in Cross River State, Southeastern Nigeria. Moved by the goddess, Aribisala sets out one evening to the fish market on the bank of River Oyono in Calabar. The evening is sultry. Low-hanging clouds and heavy winds announce the onset of rain. All those within sight are women, and they are there either to sell or buy fish. Women, some hairy, most with skin the texture of loamy soil, gather near a river of brackish waters as dusk falls, haggling over fish, “to take home, to cook for a man, to lure him away from his wife [or]… for a husband, to highlight his masculinity and satiate his sense of entitlement”. They say lightning doesn’t strike in the same place twice. The mammy-water is either a myth or a mood or a manatee or a mirage. Yet she is more likely to be found on the bank of a brown river and in the shape of a woman-fish-to-be than in the company of a lone gunman wandering the windswept streets of a deserted town west of Colorado. A writer with an aesthete’s feel for food makes home at “the centre of probably the most vibrant food culture in Nigeria”, if not in the whole of West Africa, and goes in search of fish, that species of food inseparable from romantic fantasies. One has to be slow not to see a state of grace in profile.

Why fish?

“The backbone of Cross Riverian cuisine is fish,” Aribisala writes toward the end of the pivotal chapter of Longthroat Memoirs, her much-salivated-upon book. “[F]resh, dried, ground, whole, pounded, smoked in giant mud banks with great big burning mangrove trunks. Some are exposed to cool foreign temperatures and wind and imported thousands of miles from Norway as stockfish. Everything here is cooked with fish.

If food is at once sustenance, art and social protocol, fish is one of the heartiest embodiments of all three from the point of view of the denizens of Cross River. Even in places far from large bodies of water, fish has something of magical or supernatural attraction, and the book overflows with discussions of various references to that species in erotic terms.

The chapter, “Fish Soups and Love Potions”, strikes close to the heart of this seven-spirited book. It brings together all the anxieties, fantasies, prejudices, quirks, and scepticisms connected to food and its connection to sex in a cultural context where relations between men and women, in love, marriage, and everyday transaction, are perceived as essentially unequal or exploitative. It is one of the book’s many strengths – and, I think, of Aribisala’s artistic temperament – that the discussion the author offers in this chapter proceeds in the manner of making food; curious, measured, experimental, attentive to the spirit of each ingredient, eyes set on taste as the ultimate arbiter of the great conundrum of sex, the insurmountable frontier in human affairs. This troubled link between food and sex is one of the themes of this book, but first, there is the foreplay. Into the nerve ends of that brightly alluring notion is wired a discourse on the status of Nigerian cuisines in the silent debate over the possible “globalisation” of African cultural and social practices. Aribisala has long been a passionate advocate of the aesthetic aspects of Nigerian food, while also wholesomely championing its specificity. Her weekly column in the defunct Lagos-based daily, NEXT, was one of the paper’s most-read sections. In a way, Longthroat Memoirs is the summa of those nuggets, the big feast arriving with a deluge of aromas to announce that there is more in the kitchen from where those priceless morsels came.

Broaching these controversial topics requires care and tact, and Aribisala makes the move in several innovative ways. The first is a really good fight with Michael Barry of Exotic Food the Crafty Way fame. Appreciating Barry’s skills in some ways (his Nigerian groundnut chop was “delicious”), she is just as attentive to the paradox of the exotic in Michael “Bukht becoming Barry to be more palatable to BBC viewers.” The famed connoisseur made his name by marketing the exotic but he had to standardise his own complex identity by airbrushing his name. An undercurrent of anti-imperial vigilance runs through this discussion, and the reader is prepared for it in the introduction about the still-unknown identity of Nigerian food. One of Barry’s recipes is for the Nigerian River Province chicken soup, the unexamined premise being that the river province of Nigeria is close-knit enough to have one chicken soup in common.

II

This critical overture is akin to first chasing away the fox before descending on the errant chicken! For what follows the reflection on Barry – and sundry other cookbook lords and queens – is an elaborate conceit of the so-called “jollof wars”, the sibling tussles between Nigerians and Ghanaians over the ownership of the “ubiquitous red-faced rice dish served at every social Nigerian event and sold at every fast food joint”. Surely, Aribisala thinks better of that storied dish with ancestry in the Senegalese ceebu jen than this dismissive characterisation might suggest, and the place to look for what she thinks is the long chapter deceptively titled “My Mother, I Will Not Eat Rice”. There are five sub-headings in this chapter, each taking a cleverly desultory stab at the absurd notion that something as vibrant as food daily consumed could only be born out of a monogamous marriage between two straitjacketed parents.

The connection between two men carrying a ram home, the startling discovery of a mound of nail-parings under a bench at the British Consulate, adults passing stool on the Lagos Third Mainland Bridge, a cache of puff-puffs wrapped in newspapers, and the Ibadan blood flowing in the veins of the uncompromising boy who despises boiled rice, can only be established on the level of literary conceit. People go to great lengths to eat the jollof rice cooked in the shadow of the Ghana High Commission at Onikan in Lagos. They change their routines just to be able to buy and eat hot puff-puffs at CMS, without worrying that the taste of bromide from the newspaper wrap clings to it. Aribisala’s evocation of the spirit of Ghana High jollof is poetic, heart-felt and ironic all at once, and the reader, if unfamiliar with the spot, cannot but wish to get his hands on the food. A reader who used to work that axis of TBS-Onikan-Obalende sighs with longing, especially because he’s just been interrupted by a flight attendant offering pretzels and soda.

Despite its suppleness, a metaphor is insufficient to make manifest the rationale of this chapter, contained in the statement that if “words cannot bear the weight of what you see, then you will have to change your mind about what you see”. Reality operates in excess of a given figure of speech – in excess of speech, in fact. Aribisala might know of a famous food-seller called “Shó Wò Fún E?”, owner of the buka in Ile-Ife where the writer also known as Tatalo Alamu often lunched in the mid-1990s. Idiomatically, the name translates as “Take It Or Leave It”, although the question-mark must be retained to signal the indeterminate relation between a short fuse and a long line. What Aribisala pursues in this remarkable chapter, and in the book as a whole, is an as-yet-unaccounted-for approach to cultural critique, more reflexive than a smug celebration of authenticity, in spite of her unapologetic case for the integrity of Nigerian food. It is easy to miss this approach if one ignores how the case is made through patient attention to the environmental diversity of the places from which she writes. Between the two discussions about the Nigerian River Province chicken soup and jollof, there is an unassuming detour about meat. Then we stumble on this paragraph:

“In Calabar, it is not unusual to run into world-renowned delicacies pretending to be nobodies: strawberries up on the plateau at the Obudu Cattle Ranch; sole peddled out of old basins on Hawkins Street; lime-green and red rambutans hawked on little girls’ heads in May. And now usu, which might be the tartufi bianchi, one of the most expensive, luxurious foods in the world.”

To appreciate the importance of the environment in this narrative, one could reflect on the nationality of those men and women who preside over the kingdom that is the Ghana High Jollof Rice. Does nationality matter?

Due to geographical reasons, human traffic from Northwestern Sierra Leone to southern Cameroon has been one continuous river flowing in both directions, even long before the end of slavery brought about greater safety of movement. Economic historians and anthropologists as different as Sara Berry, Claude Meillassoux and Anthony Hopkins have highlighted these movements as crucial factors in the accelerated agricultural expansion and urbanism of early 20th century West Africa. Cocoa grew in the same region; cattle thrived in the lower Sahel, as did crops like rice, sorghum, millet, and maize. In the region, especially between Sierra Leone and Western Niger Delta, migration back and forth was and still remains a fact of life, and those who move bring and shed a lot of baggage, including ethnic and cultural peculiarities.

The progenitors of those Yoruba nationalists who would die or kill for the cause of the “Oodu’a nation” probably came from northern Togo three generations ago. As recently as the late 1970s, there were ethnic Akan and Twi as natives of Yaba, Lagos, beautiful threads forever sewn into the Nigerian human fabric. What goes for people goes for food: as a West African staple, rice has been historically cultivated on a vast scale in the Senegal River valley for ages. Familiarity with the lore and history of countries from Senegal to northern Sierra Leone will reveal that rice plays a central role in tales, proverbs and songs, as the locust bean tree does in those of the lower Niger. Long accepted as crucial knowledge in specialised academic fields, the blend of history, geography, literature, art, economics, lifestyle and politics embodied in these migratory patterns is yet to become available to a general audience. It is pleasant to see Aribisala write about food in such a way as to nudge the reader to this kind of awareness, precious mentally-liberating knowledge hidden in plain sight of everyday hustle.

III

What we have in Longthroat Memoirs, then, is a brilliant excursus into ethnography, a culinary sociology of Nigeria for which there is no precedent. While the geographical distribution of the plants, crops and animals gives an indication of a long, complex African history in the making, Aribisala’s careful attention to diverse Nigerian cuisines doubles as an anatomy of various cultural attitudes toward food within the country. These attitudes have been the topics of countless discussions and threadbare ethnic jokes, some self-directed, most genuinely disparaging. With the benefit of long residences in Lagos, Ibadan, and Calabar, the author offers an account both subjective and plainspoken.

Fish may be ubiquitous in Calabar meals for reasons similar to why peppers are in those of Ibadan, but there is no prize for guessing which will travel better. Aribisala manages to retain her satisfaction in being Yoruba-born (native of Ibadan, no less) while giving “Yoruba omi obe” (watery stew) the most savage review imaginable. Yoruba vegetable sauces (or soups) are plenty and can be cooked in creative ways, but few have had the luck of being even nationally tolerated, a pitiable condition when compared to afang, edikang ikong, or banga. The Niger Deltans, we learn, are the crown princes of aromatics, they who contribute what we know as pepper soup to Nigerian cuisine—though they call it nsala. And what is pepper soup without the aroma? No physical and psychological aspect of food escapes the caring vigilance of this author who, after all, is a self-confessed lover of food. A work which proposes to pick a gauntlet and break Nigerian food into the arena of global flavours cannot ignore some standardisation, and Aribisala walks the talk by providing generous tips on cooking each meal, soup, stew or snack that she personally enjoys. The recipes and preparation processes move unobtrusively through the narrative grooves, such that the reader can hardly miss them or successfully hope to cull each as a discrete item, but will end up savouring the delicacy, the mushroom oyster being just one case in point.

Stylistically, this is a book with a very strong, compelling identity. Aribisala has demonstrated that there are many creative ways of writing a book. It doesn’t have to be a “novel”. It could just be about food. But, like an unpretentious, self-knowing food, it has to have just about everything that goes well with the spirit of the person who makes it, and trust enough in that self-knowing to be hopeful of an identification in the imaginary of others. She has also shown that writing such a book would lead to intelligent, eye-opening adventures in real life, such as a mini-sociology of Calabar, captive of a complex mass of unresolved Pentecostal and nativised fantasies, or the workings of a Nigerian parastatal. It is a frequently funny book, with sustained metaphors that bring a sentence or paragraph to an end with a laughter that shatters. Recall, for instance, the incredible imagery of a “blender going for a stretch of about thirty minutes and then you… would know, without doubt, that the poor blender had, in great bitterness of spirit and thorough exhaustion, given up the ghost.”

I think Longthroat Memoirs could have been better served by crisp copyediting. Aribisala sometimes uses compound, densely reflective sentences, which are playful, rich in metaphor and strong on euphemism or apostrophe. A more careful editorial oversight would definitely rescue a preposition or a verb that has fallen off in the process of constructing those exquisite sentences. Regarding structure and narrative pace, I would prefer the section containing the seven chapters (24-29) from the discussion of afang to fish-soups to precede the chapter on cooking. “To Cook Or Not To Cook” ends on an original note of temperance and fairness – to each her own – beyond which only the undiscerning will continue to argue about whom should cook for whom. Moreover, this chapter would work quite well appearing just before “Dead Man’s Helmet”, a chastening account of the author’s father-in-law as a refugee during the Nigerian civil war, which shows the utter redundancy of aesthetic food-making in the blizzards of warfare.

A quarter of the way into Longthroat Memoirs, Aribisala writes: “Daughters learn the process from their mothers, tweak it and pass it on to their daughters, each tweak adding individuality in taste and texture. The desired result is not consistency, but rather adaptability to the individual or household palate.”

She is reflecting on the making of dawadawa, a condiment that is widely produced and used across Nigeria and West Africa, and compares the process to making cheese or wine. The argument in point here is about the amount of labour, mostly by women, which this undertaking requires, and what it means for the global renown that such a product might acquire. Rereading this passage, I wonder if the variation on method described in the process of preparing dawadawa plays a role in how West African cultures have responded to change in the industrial age, and if there are any pointers in this attitude to the hypothesis, beloved of social anthropologists, about African isolation prior to the dawn of European Renaissance. If one can depart from a set pattern (“adding individuality”), what is the status of the knowledge thus passed on, and what does it mean for the packaging of Nigerian (or any African) cuisines? Nigerian populations are now broadly distributed across the world, but their cuisines, even in the standardised, affordable menus available at restaurants in North America and the United Kingdom (boiled rice, fried plantains, choices of meat and adaptable vegetables), have not followed suit. Imagine arriving in Antwerp on a wintry night and looking for a place to dine after hours in airplanes, and wishing for options besides Ethiopian and Korean dishes. Imagine the thrill of having a Nigerian meal as one option.

In Food and Love, his comparative history of European and Asian cuisines, Jack Goody advances several factors for the successful globalisation of Chinese (and, later, Indian) foods. They were initially inexpensive, relying less on meat and more on nutritious vegetables; they were suitable for take-aways; and their operations relied on forms of labour and capital that did not always conform to European bureaucratic practices of formal contracts. It remains to be seen if Nigerian cuisines have comparable aspirations. Aribisala keeps this idea in view, but I think she is far more invested in an intra-mural discussion among Nigerians. Reading this book leaves me in no doubt that she has come a long way from the kind of observation fundamental to Goody’s thesis about the absence of differentiated cuisine south of the Sahara.

IV

One of the shortest chapters in the book, the seven-page “Henshaw Town Beach Market,” doesn’t seem to have anything to do with food. It is about a market, an old, storied one, built on the site of the wharf of Nigeria’s first but short-lived colonial capital. Aribisala paints an endearing picture of this market whose glorious history is all but forgotten, a fact that doesn’t bother the women who live off it. The peculiar logic of the marketplace resides in the difference between how things appear to the discerning eye and how they are described or named. The ripe plantain is “red”; the green one is “black.” The all-stiffed-up attitude of the market-goer who misreads the shiftiness of the fish-seller as dishonesty thus mirrors the unexamined alienation of the “Island big boys”, inhabitants of Lagos’s choice real estates. These sophisticates do not care where what they eat comes from. Much less are they interested in the intrinsic value of it, in comparison with the offerings in the most exotic-sounding restaurants in proximity to the habitations that support their fantasies. The person who goes to the market once, even twice, in a week is a result-oriented visitor and may not afford the precarious investment of the storeowner, the true market denizen who does not easily distinguish destination from destiny. Odd as it sounds, the smooth operation of the enterprise that sustains both buyer and seller depends on the inviolable purity of this disequilibrium. This is where the ruling food-sex conceit in Longthroat Memoirs makes such beautiful sense.

Pushing back against the trendy fascination with sex in newish African literature as a marketing stunt, Aribisala writes at some point: “There are places in a woman that a penis will never reach.” The air in the room where Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina presides over a writing workshop has become unbearable. In order to exhale, Aribisala puts this notion to test by positioning a friend, Aderewa, as the foil for her hunches about sex. Sharp-tongued, slightly crazed and unshameable, Aderewa comes across as the perfect contrast to Aribisala, although most of what she says in their hour-long, eleven-page conversation complements the idea of lack of “intrinsic fuckability”, one of the reasons that Aribisala’s recent essay on feminism, “Sister Outsider”, startled many readers. It is an enlightening exchange. Like most of the things that sustain life, sex is part-fantasy and part-experience, and to think of it as overrated is to draw attention to what gives it a lasting meaning.

In Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Healers, a young woman contemplates lovemaking as an affirmation of her desire for companionship, and whispers to her lover: “When it begins, you want to get in so badly you have to fight me to let you in. When it ends, I’m the one who has to fight to keep you in.” Either from the perspective of the submissive or domineering partner (if those), it seems that the sexual act is an unending rehearsal of inequality, even when it is satisfying to both parties. Yes, the penetrating act does not exhaust all possibilities of lovemaking, despite its fame. Though crucial to a love affair and matrimonial sanity, sex is only one item on a list that partners make up mostly by whim and circumstance. The late Gore Vidal was once asked why his relationship with his companion, Howard Austen, lasted so long, and he replied: “It’s simple. No sex.” Given Vidal’s legendary reputation with irony, it might be prudent not to take him literally. But we get the point. A main aim of the sexual act, pleasure, is also what food (good, sensually desirable food) provides, and it is valuable because it is often difficult to quantify.

Aribisala writes sympathetically and thoughtfully; she is not afraid to break the feminist rank, and does not pull punches with men who belittle women’s attitude toward cooking. Thinking through the myth of cooking as a gendered instrument of domestication and domination, which extends to the perception of women as sex objects, she dwells on the putdown by an acquaintance who calls her “housewife”, and proposes several explanations for the myth’s durability. I like the ones about pheromones and hormones because they are scientific, commonsensical, and bring us back to stories of fish. I think that there may be additional explanations for the food-sex complex, and its link to power. For one, they both satisfy the base instincts of all animals and expose humans, especially, to bodily vulnerability. This explains why comedy is most congenial to public expressions of instincts about these two pleasures.

On a more culturally-specific level, the following passage from Peter Morton-William’s 1960 essay about the Yoruba Ogboni (traditional judicial) society is instructive:

“An elderly Ogboni who feared that a rival would try to suborn one of his wives to poison him, might marry a young girl, sending his other wives to live elsewhere, and require her alone to cook and care for him. He would take his bride to the iledi (the society’s meeting place) and there split a kola nut and with the prongs of the edan pick up one piece and give it to her to eat, then pick up a second piece for himself. The two would then be ritually bound together as the edan are linked, and she would be told that if she betrayed him in any way, she would surely die or become mad.”

This sounds exploitative, and raises a number of questions, but whether the man cares for the woman is not one of them. And who can say that such a union will not lead to genuine love? There is a reason that men in monogamous marriages from this culture might favour a childless woman who is caring over the one who has children for them but likes to pick fights. Similarly, reflecting on the process of preparing dawadawa, the fermented locust beans without which the spicing of Cross Riverian soup is incomplete, Aribisala notes that fornicating women are forbidden from preparing it but not from eating it. From this cultural distance, anybody with a sense of dignity could do no better than relate to his or her partner with all that is fair in love.

Each to his or her own, for whom she or he cooks, after whom he or she looks.

This piece appears in the Chronic (April 2017). An edition which aims to complicate the questions raised by food insecurity, to cook and serve them differently.

Food is largely presented as scarcity, lack, loss – Africa’s always desperate exceptionalism or exceptional desperation or whatever. In this issue, we put food back on the table: to restore the interdependence between the mouth that eats and the mouth that speaks, and to delve deeper into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make food both a subversive art and a site of pleasure.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop,or get copies from your nearest dealer.

There is a sense of justice and spirit of resignation in paying for excess luggage because of cookbooks, even if my pocket hurts badly. And there are some books that I will never again leave behind. This resolve is crammed full of reasons collated with hindsight. I did not come to the Western Cape, South Africa, expecting to search in vain for books on my kind of food. Did not expect to search the shelves of bookshops in the flesh, and online, desperate to find what we eat from Mauritania to Guinea. No West African food. No plantain roti, pepper soup, banku, kenkey, no adayi-like gbegiri, no cassava leaves pesto. Food that I’ve been dying to cook, tweak, eat, imagine. The fact that one cannot buy one black African cookbook in a mainstream Western Cape bookshop with hundreds of cookbooks stunned me. In the end, I wanted to stand in the middle of Exclusive Books and yell: “Do you people know you have to fly over us to get to Nigella!”

Then I found the food differences between “us” and our hosts complicated and simple, principled and factitious, an unwritten rule book. I found with astonishment and annoyance that the rights of guinea-fowls are inviolable. South Africans have a thing for them. One man’s meat is another man’s totem, never forget. There is a pair of these blue-headed birds, and I cannot be sure if they are married or dating, that keep returning to my door with audacity. (One of them has a limp, this is how I recognise them.) They wake me up with dull pecking against the glass. They must think my house belongs to well-to-do-guinea-fowls. I throw a shoe at the door and the bang sends the small-brained animals flapping away. For the record, we don’t call them birds in Nigeria. They are sweet, dark, lean, oleaginous meat attired in black and white polka dotted pyjamas.

My neighbours in the estate in Somerset West have statues of guinea-fowls on their front patio. The fat squatting light-blue models make my Nigerian pikins giggle. In our new residence, in shops and craft markets, gracing coasters and fridge magnets and table linen, large paint canvases too, guinea fowls are commemorated birds. In Lagos, a guinea fowl would not dare knock on my door first thing in the morning. It will end up boiled and stewed or skewered for suya.

I therefore have both motivation and provocation: the breach between the buying power of people who eat similar to what I eat and the Caucasian residents of the Western Cape who are rather conservative meat-eaters – the people that bookstores cater for; the fact that I have been attempting to buy books and have had to import them with the help of a bookshop in Cape Town (the only one who bothered to hear me out and agreed to source the books for me); and the annoyance of unwelcome break of day guinea-fowl visits. Oh I’m just dying to shake up this well-manicured estate brimming with overindulged, strutting, loud-talking birds. Fried guinea fowl is the very thing that will reduce my blood pressure. I tell myself there is a need for an emergency cookbook bag that travels everywhere with me, excess luggage considered and provided for, in spite of the pain. These are the books that will be in that bag:

The Groundnut Cookbook by Duval Timothy, Jacob Fodio Todd and Folayemi Brown. Any book that unzips with groundnut stew has my strong allegiance for the duration of the journey. The three young men, ranging from cute to sinewy, with glorious heads of hair, boast of family backgrounds encompassing Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Kenya, South Sudan and South London. As might be expected, their background informs the recipes in their book. I love the way they don’t presume you can fry dodo or that you know how to suck an orange “the proper way”. I plan to make their maize meal noodles, their moin-moin steamed in Titus sardine tins, pineapple jam (with my own twist), garri oatcakes, plantain roti, injera pikelet (a flat bread that is a cross between injera and crumpets), and page 274’s tomato stew with guinea fowl (naturally).

Senegalese Chef Pierre Thiam’s two hardback books – Yolele: Recipes from the heart of Senegal and Modern Senegalese Recipes From the Source to the Bowl. The latter is his new book and is bewitchment from start to finish. Ravishingly photographed with images of freshly caught fish, places of worship, homes, multicoloured fishing boats, the Casamance River with “rice paddies, palm wine, palm oil, honey and fresh oysters”. Interspersed with portraits of lamb shank mafé, fonio pilaf, sorrel-okra sauce, Nigerian kilishi, coconut mussels with crispy yuca fries, red palm brownies and poached mangoes…“This book is meant to transport you deep into the vibrant, diverse food scene… you’ll learn about the different regions of Senegal and their unique cooking styles and ingredients.” And Thiam delivers on his promise.

Fran Osseo Asare’s cookbook, The Ghana Cookbook, is co-authored with Barbara Baeta. It’s a sensible, structured, extremely sure-handed book that is like a Nigerian aunty who has cooked for half a century. I trust the book’s good sense and placidity. It has a recipe for Ghanaian jollof rice – which I prefer to Nigerian – and indispensable twists to familiar ingredients. Aside from stewed bambara groundnuts and one pot coconut bean porridge and palavar sauce, it features garri, one of my favourite foods, in a one pot dish with scrambled eggs, leftover meat, fish or corned beef and tomato gravy. The dish is called gari foto. I plan to make Ashanti fowl, stuffed deboned chicken, for a grand occasion.

Then there’s Mpho Tsukudu and Anna Trapido’s EAT.TING: Lose weight, gain health, find yourself. I have to admit to buying this book impulsively because it is the first food book with black authorship that I have seen since I moved to the Western Cape two years ago. I am delighted to open the pages and find millet (uphoko) and sorghum, anise and yogurt millet breakfast porridge, classic dikgobe – black-eyed beans cooked with sorghum. Overjoyed to find mucilaginous root vegetables, amadumbes, cooked with bacon, cream and rosemary; five-hour oven-cooked oxtail, and tripe and trotters curry. Mabele (sorghum meal) with coconut cream and peanut butter. Amasi curd cheese. There is a sense of rightness with the world when a book confesses that “chickens from the shop don’t taste good… their muscles are soft even if it says ‘free range’ on the packet. I go to Diepsloot to buy a real ‘Hard Body’ township chicken.”

Mabel Segun’s Rhapsody, a celebration of Nigerian Cooking and Food Culture was a book I found hiding behind other books in a bookshop in Lagos. I bought it as a gift for a friend and never delivered it. I flipped through the pages and immediately put it away among my own books. It is priceless. Not only full of recipes, it is full of rationales for eating and powerful food/life adages. Words swimming effortlessly between cooking, living and eating: “A woman must not buy only one tuber of yam from the market; she must buy at least three.” Or “Very hot stew is licked from the side.” (Delicate issues must be tackled with care.) The conversation that runs alongside the delivery of recipes in Mabel Segun’s Rhapsody is hearty and utterly irresistible.

The Maggi Family Menu Cookbook, compiled from the popular 1980s television series sponsored by Nestle Foods Nigeria, PLC – out of print for over 20 years, dog eared, stained, wet-and-dried rippling pages held together by prayers and therefore irreplaceable, this book features recipes for dambun zogale made from moistened ground maize, zogale leaves and mai shanu; Cameroonian ndole; the renowned Ibadan abula, and banga rice. It has an indispensable Nigerian ingredients glossary with photographic representation.

A Taste of Calabar (Selected Efik recipes to warm your stomach) by Arit Ana. I have no recollection of buying this book; it walked into my kitchen many years ago. By virtue of its doing so of its own accord and special powers, and because tucked in its pages is a strong aroma of my years lived in Calabar – of ekpang nkukwo, ukang ukom, fresh fish stew, afia efere – it will be carried henceforth from continent to continent in my bag of cookbooks.

Last but not least, my heat and spice scriptures: Ian Hemphill’s Spice and Herb Bible, and The Spicy Food Lover’s Bible by Dave Dewitt and Nancy Gerlach. Heat and aromatics are noncommittal standpoints in many countries’ cuisines, especially so in the Western Cape, where many guests often complain of the heat of our Nigerian dishes. Yet, what is life without the addition of hot pepper and the excitation of the palate with spices. What is guinea-fowl stew without heat to cut through the oiliness of the bird’s flesh? These bibles are as essential as street navigators. May it never be said that Yemisi traveled abroad and got lost in the bland, pepper-less cuisines of foreign lands. Amen.

This piece appears in the Chronic (April 2017). An edition which aims to complicate the questions raised by food insecurity, to cook and serve them differently.

Food is largely presented as scarcity, lack, loss – Africa’s always desperate exceptionalism or exceptional desperation or whatever. In this issue, we put food back on the table: to restore the interdependence between the mouth that eats and the mouth that speaks, and to delve deeper into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make food both a subversive art and a site of pleasure.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop,or get copies from your nearest dealer.

In London Kamwendo’s interpretation ofAmos Tutuola’s sly satire of spectral global capitalism and Afro-modernity, debt is paid off with body parts traded on the open market, human flesh carries magnetic appeal and beauty is fatal.

This graphic story features in the Chronic (August 2016), an edition in which we explore ideas around mythscience, science fiction and graphic storytelling. In opposition to the idea of the future as progress – a linear march through time – we propose a sense of time is innately human: “it’s time” when everyone gets there.

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]]>http://chimurengachronic.co.za/the-complete-gentleman/feed/07436The Art of Suspensehttp://chimurengachronic.co.za/the-art-of-suspense/
http://chimurengachronic.co.za/the-art-of-suspense/#respondThu, 07 Apr 2016 16:37:08 +0000http://chimurengachronic.co.za/?p=6768Lidudumalingani Mqombothi revisits the football matches of his childhood, when radio, not television, was most people’s ticket to the beautiful game. But a radio was not the only requirement for a full experience – an active imagination and an attentive ear were integral to engaging in the virtuosity of the audio commentary.

Only a handful of things in life are an exact science, memory is not one of them, so let us assume the day to have been a Saturday or Sunday, the two days that football is usually played. We stood across the road to watch the match at a house whose front door was left ajar to let the afternoon sun in. We squinted so that the sun’s rays would not blind us. Light had gathered on the edges of the mountain, forest, houses and riverbanks, colouring everything in hues of orange.

The experience, though only limited to a few minutes, was conclusive. In that limited time, one thing came into focus: television was no place for football. The players, in the few minutes we watched before the door was closed in our faces, appeared to run in the same place, like one does in a dream, almost backwards even. The commentators had languid voices; nothing excited or disappointed them – not a bone-crunching tackle, not even the near-miss of a goal. We were made to watch replays of the same action over and over again until it dried of excitement. Because of this we never really saw much at all.

On radio, football adopts a different principle. When the commentators are talking about something unrelated to the match, or when they go quiet, one is left with two things, the sound of the crowd roaring at the stadium and the other, far greater than seeing, the absence of sight, the ability to re-imagine where the ball is on the field without the commentators calling it.

Later in my teen years, my experience of football on television became frequent and lasted for longer periods. Even then watching the game on television always felt like a scam, like one was being manipulated, only shown the match in fragments, to watch one play over and over again, whilst the game carried on.

In contrast, radio demands collaboration from the listener, an active imagination, an attentive ear, a wandering spirit. It is not for spectators but dreamers, dreamers of goals, tackles, passes, skills, saves, and the impossible.

Radio took me and every other young boy with dreams to dance on soccer balls like Doctor Khumalo, Jay Jay Okocha, Patrick Pule “Ace” Ntsoelengoe, to the biggest stages. One felt part of it, the anecdotes from the commentators, the way they painted the pictures in our minds, one was there, listening so much that one began not only to hear the game but to see it, to mould the players and stadiums from the commentators’ descriptions.

The houses of the Zikhovane village, a village that stands on a mound between two valleys, are an uneven combination of thatched rondavels and six corner houses, built in a single line, all facing the sunrise. The residents wake up to catch the sun’s rays sneaking in through their front doors, whilst the valley hums its morning melody of flowing water. As a child, during weekend afternoons, behind kraals and houses, we would wave the sun away while listening to football on the radio.

The late Zingisile Johnson Mathiso, also widely known as “Ngxilimbela” (Big Boss), and Mthuthuzeli Scott, the two Xhosa speaking commentators from Umhlobo Wenene FM, brought Abedi Pele, Sunday Oliseh and Nelson “Teenage” Dladla right into the village. The field beneath my home turned into exotic stadiums with green pitches, straight lines and stands reaching up to the sky. The fans, always cheering, always in awe, were re-imagined from the sound of fans that would pierce the commentary on the radio.

Even when television arrived in the villages, first as tiny black-and-white sets, then as big colour screens with remotes, radio commentary remained in the hearts of many. During matches, TVs in most homes were mute. They played in silence as the radio commentary was on. There was no perfect synergy between the two, however. The goals were scored on radio before they were on television and the seconds apart would feel like a lifetime. To the absent-minded, it would appear as if there had been, within a space of seconds, an identical goal that had just been scored. Though it gave one the feeling of seeing the future, seeing the goal before it was scored on television, the experience was not pleasant. Over time, when it had sunk in to people’s minds that a mute television and radio commentary do not go together, they retreated to their radios.

The other element that football radio commentary has perfected is the art of suspense. Mathiso and Scott invented suspense. There are moments they arrive at after building up the play, moments in which they do not care about the words they choose – words are half-begun and abandoned before they end. They are simply too long to be finished and still keep up with the game. The moments of suspense come after these build-ups, the two could have easily told the listener that the player is in an offside position, or that they have either scored or missed the goal, but they do not, instead they let the soccer fans in the stadium erupt into euphoria for a second or so before revealing what has just happened. Choosing silence, in such a crucial moment, to hold almost an entire country in a state where they do not breathe, is to choose art.

While commentating Mathiso and Scott performed a theatre that was as important as the game. They would go on for minutes speaking about something irrelevant, about people the listeners did not know. They did not even have to commentate the same game to be in conversation, they could be miles apart, yet the synergy between them and the fans always remained strong. They had worked together for 23 years when Mathiso passed away in 2013. Scott now commentates alone, but continues with the tradition, performing soliloquies to entertain and amuse.

After a weekend of soccer, school halls on Monday, and later first practice of the week at the soccer pitch, were not only dominated by talk of the games but of what Mathiso or Scott had said. It was their commentary that held the memory of the games together. Through them we could remember the games. In our own matches in the villages, there was always someone willing to imitate radio commentary. Even then, with the soccer match happening right in front of everyone’s eyes, the fans would gather around the commentator, choosing to listen rather than to watch the match that was happening in front of them. As a player on the field, hearing a commentator with the radio style, barefoot players re-imagined themselves as superstars, playing in a crowded stadium.

There have been radio commentators that have moved to television, bringing with them the energy of radio. Still, something is always left behind in that tiny radio box.

Ubuntu be Afrika, my son, is now three years old, and he loves football and watches it on television. On the few occasions that I still follow matches on the radio, I wish he would sit and re-imagine the game with me.

This story features in the Chronic Books (April 2016), an edition in which weexplore the tensions between reform and revolution, and decolonisation and the neoliberal order in the academy, through the lens of history and via the alternate education paradigms based in indigenous knowledge systems, and also arising from South Africa’s radical anti-apartheid struggle.

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]]>http://chimurengachronic.co.za/the-art-of-suspense/feed/06768The Invention of African Footballhttp://chimurengachronic.co.za/the-invention-of-african-football/
http://chimurengachronic.co.za/the-invention-of-african-football/#respondWed, 06 Apr 2016 11:54:14 +0000http://chimurengachronic.co.za/?p=6770Moses März documents his fleeting orbit of the “African” football scene, from the Afcon 2008 tourney in Ghana to Angola in 2009 and the 2010 FIFA World Cup extravaganza further south. All in all it was brief, expensive, stereotypically Eurocentric and big on defeat.

My short-lived career as an African football correspondent began with a readers’ competition organised by the alternative German football magazine, 11 Freunde, Yahoo, and Eurosport, the television channel that covers the African Cup of Nations (Afcon) for German audiences. To enter the competition you had to write a 100-word story about “Africa” and football and the winner would be flown to Ghana to cover the 2008 Afcon.

Reason, or reasonableness, is something one seldom finds in the little that passes for reporting on African football in Germany and so I knew exactly what to write. My article on Kumasi Asante Kotoko, theatrically titled “The Porcupine Warriors”, contained all the usual stereotypes: a romantic trip in a crowded trotro at sunset over the hills of Kumasi, a juju priest pissing against the goal poles before the match, the Ashanti king sitting under royal umbrellas while the tropical rain poured over the rest of the spectators in the stadium, an overall poor display worthy only of the German Regionalliga, and a final scene where the goalkeeper leaves the poles in protest against an unfair penalty.

I was not surprised when I received the notification that I had won the competition that had been subjected to a vote by an online community. To be sure, I had also given my own candidature an unfair advantage by posting several hundred votes from my own continuously renewed IP address.

Short on nonsense though it was, “The Porcupine Warriors” nevertheless marked my beginning as an African football correspondent. A year after the tournament in Ghana concluded, 11 Freunde asked whether I would like to cover the Afcon in Angola for them. In the run-up to the 2010 FIFA World Cup, football in Africa was beginning to gain journalistic currency. The Afcon had in the past only been a gap-filler for the few weeks the Bundesliga went on winter break. Now heated discussions about whether South Africa was ready to host the World Cup were filling the sports pages alongside speculations about whether an African team would be strong enough to progress past the quarter-finals for the first time in the history of the tournament. In a strange way Angola was considered to be the litmus test for both of these things.

11Freunde had reached an agreement with Puma to produce a once-off small booklet about the Afcon tournament in Angola. Puma – under the leadership of Jochen Zeitz of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa – had also just released its Africa Unity Kit. The uniform was brown up to the hips and light blue on top, to represent, they said, the African soil and sky. The accompanying “Play for Life” posters, with Samuel Eto’o, John Mensah and Emmanuel Eboué in their African Unity Kits – with an elephant, an eagle and a giraffe in the background and a lion hugging a ball at their feet – hung all over Berlin.

Initially everything went according to plan. I had passed a basic Portuguese course and got my visa and I searched through the only two relevant resources my Berlin library housed on the country – Ryszard Kapuściński’s Another Day of Life and Abderrahmane Sissako’s Rostov-Luanda. I had considered myself well prepared until the Togolese national team bus was attacked by the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda two days before the opening match in Luanda. Puma immediately pulled out of the deal and there was no money left to cover my travel expenses. Initially, my chances of winning back the money by selling as many articles as possible did not seem too bad. When I arrived on the last day of the group stages the only other German journalist at the tournament was already packing his bags to fly back to Frankfurt.

“I have seen enough,” he said, “I have already sold more than enough articles and will piece the rest together from home. Angola is just too expensive.”

After our conversation I walked to the press area of the Estádio 11 de Novembro – a Chinese-built stadium on the outskirts of Luanda. I took a seat in the almost empty press area. I could make out the imposing presence of the BBC World Service’s Piers Edwards at a distance, an authority in African football reporting. Ghanaian radio journalists were standing at some distance from one another while they shouted live commentary into their cell-phones. I sat back and relaxed. The brief from the football magazine was clear. I was supposed to cover everything happening around the matches themselves. The conventional reporting could be left to agencies.

In one of the first articles I submitted, called “Lost in Luanda”, I droned on about the high price of bread and the dinginess of the hotel I was staying in which let out rooms by the hour for US$100, about Stefan Hüsgen, the director of the local Goethe-Institut, who lived on canned foods because fresh produce was too expensive, and I dared to analyse how the Dos Santos government used the tournament as a propaganda tool with its “Estamos juntos!” slogan and the free scarves that had the MPLA emblem on one end and the Angolan flag on the other.

Apart from the stadium and the tourist complex, I did not get to see much of Luanda or the rest of the country in the two weeks I was there. Because of the high prices and my rudimentary Portuguese it turned out to be easier to stay in Luanda and live off crackers and sardines sold from one of the containers in the neighbourhood.

Because of my restricted movements I tried to focus on the actual game. Germans wanted to know about Ghana since both national teams would meet in the same FIFA World Cup group, so I spoke to André Ayew and Anthony Baffoe. Ayew spoke of the Black Stars as the underdogs of the tournament and Baffoe spoke out about European misconceptions of “African football”. The response I received from the editors was timid at best. But when I covered a failed public viewing event in Zango, on the outskirts of Luanda, next to a refugee camp, I received rave reviews.

On the day before the semi-final the organising committee invited the few remaining journalists to an evening out on the Ilha de Luanda. It was the first time in nearly two weeks that we had eaten a warm supper.

“It’s about time!” shouted Frank Simon from France Football when he saw the buffet prepared on the beach. After a couple of beers Simon started making fun of magazines like 11 Freunde, laughing about the fact that they considered writing about the fans of Didier Drogba as important as news about the player himself. “Guys, do you know that Ghanaian TV even interviewed this guy because they think he is some kind of expert?” The round of laughter was friendly but I felt slightly awkward. My cover had been blown.

Mark Gleeson, who boasts of writing an average of four African football articles a day, became the object of a major news story himself when he ran into problems with his visitor’s visa. “First they don’t want me to come into the country, then they don’t want me to leave,” he said. Back in Germany the corruption Mark Gleeson was subjected to at the Quatro de Fevereiro International Airport made bigger headlines than the tournament itself.

From the start the Cabinda attack and the surreal opening match, in which Mali scored four goals in the last 16 minutes to equalise against the Angolan team, both led to the impression that this Afcon could not be taken seriously as a sporting competition. The event was stamped as “the most expensive tournament in history” and that was that. The fact that Egypt went on to win the tournament and had not even qualified for the FIFA World Cup did not increase the attractiveness of the event in Europe.

A few months later I woke up in a small room in the backyard of a house in Cape Town. Again, I was convinced that I was in the right place at the right time. South Africa was busy counting the days until the start of the World Cup and the tournament was set to be the summit of my career as an African football expert.

The editors at 11 Freunde were expecting background articles explaining the vuvuzela phenomenon, why so many African teams have European coaches, and a description of what a typical South African dish tastes like. But something was amiss. I was no longer alone. A whole armada of journalists, who had spent years preparing for this tournament, had entered the country. Somehow it became impossible to cut through the noise.

I travelled the country from one corner to the other: Cameroon in Cape Town, Ghana in Johannesburg, Nigeria in Bloemfontein and Côte d’Ivoire in Nelspruit. One defeat after another. When Ghana lost to Uruguay in the quarter-finals the abyss opened. Without a single African team left in the tournament, I had come to the end of the road. My career was finished and I knew it. I have not written a word about African football since.

This story features in the Chronic Books (April 2016), an edition in which weexplore the tensions between reform and revolution, and decolonisation and the neoliberal order in the academy, through the lens of history and via the alternate education paradigms based in indigenous knowledge systems, and also arising from South Africa’s radical anti-apartheid struggle.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop, or get copies from your nearest dealer.